In July this year the Wolves Lane Centre community celebrated the installation of solar panels.

On
20th July this summer, site users and volunteers at Wolves
Lane held a celebration of their newly installed solar panels. This
was the culmination of a huge effort to raise the funds and install
the panels to make the Wolves Lane site more sustainable. Local food
growing and energy generation will play an important part in our move
to a low carbon future.

The
panels will generate electricity for use on site. It is a 12.4
kiloWatt hour peak system and since installation has generated 5.27
megaWatt hours and saved just over 2,000 kilogrammes of carbon
emissions (equivalent to planting 7 trees). Most of the electricity
will be used in the Palm House, where water pumps use a lot of
energy. The installation work was carried out for free by a local
resident who runs solar installation company Drakes Renewables.
There are 31 panels on two roofs and it is an innovative installation
using 400 W panels imported from Canada.

The
money for the panels was raised through a crowdfund run by Spacehive
for the Mayor of London’s office. The panels were paid for by
local residents (including members of the Friends of Wolves Lane) and
local rap artist Jhus. Generous donations from the Mayor of London
and Haringey Council will add to the project by paying for insulation
materials and fees for legal and electrical work.

Wolves Lane Plant Centre https://wolveslane.org/, was formerly the plant nursery for Haringey Council. The site is still owned by Haringey Council and is leased to the Wolves Lane Consortium (Organiclea, Crop Drop and the Ubele Initiative) and is growing a huge harvest of local food that supports a local veg bag scheme (Crop Drop, https://www.cropdrop.co.uk/), a London restaurant (Ottolenghi), food for homeless people (Edible London, https://ediblelondon.weebly.com/ ) and Black Rootz . Local not-for-profit Wolves Lane Flower Company also rent space onsite (https://www.wolveslaneflowercompany.com/ ).

Drakes Renewables, a local business, have installed two arrays for us. On the boiler house roof (18 panels) shown above and another 13 on the classroom roof. It is a 12.4kW peak system with very high specification panels (possibly a UK first).

It was all connected up late on Thursday 23rd May and generated 272 kW hours – equivalent to saving 107 kg of CO2 and planting nearly half a tree in the first week.

We have a web portal which gives us real time information about what the panels are up to. We plan to have a display which will show in real time how much power we are generating and and our CO2 savings.

So, we would like to thank all the people who supported our crowdfund!

This will really help the site finances because we will save on our electricity bills and we will receive the Feed in Tariff. We will use most of the electricity on site, but may consider installing a battery to store electricity we don’t use immediately.

The project also helps the Borough towards its target to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

The project has been a fantastic team effort from the site volunteers, the Ubele Initiative, Crop Drop and Organiclea and we are all very proud of this achievement